Sunday, June 26, 2016

Hank Poulson and the tails on a distribution.

We need to welcome rather than shrink from trade and economic competition. Trump calls our current trade deals “disgusting, the absolute worst ever negotiated by any country in the world.” This is simply false. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the average American household income is roughly $10,000 higher because of the postwar expansion of trade. Because of trade, we add jobs and foster innovation and competitiveness. That doesn’t mean that people aren’t losing jobs and suffering in certain industries. However, it is wrong to tell the American people that we can turn back the clock and win, with merely 4 percent of the world’s population, by walling ourselves off from the remaining 7 billion people and the markets they represent. Instead, we need to fix the programs that help U.S. industries and workers transition to new and better jobs. We need better training, new education programs and a more robust safety net. The policies Trump endorses would destroy, not save, U.S. jobs.

Listen to closely to Trump and he's saying the trade deals badly negotiated and not that he's opposed to free trade. He just doesn't like deals where the US gives and gains little. If your on the wrong side of the $10k average above, and I have a feeling that distribution skewed so there are far more under than above, then Trump will make sense.

No comments:

On the tomb of the nineteenth century Church historian Bishop Mandel Creighton are inscribed the words: ‘He tried to write true history.’

Like the bishop – who was a member of my own college at Oxford – I believe that there is such a thing as ‘true history’.

What happened in the past is unalterable and definite. To uncover it – or as much of it as possible – the historian has several tools, among them chronology, documentation, memoirs, and the vast apparatus of scholarly work in which others have delved and laboured in the same vineyard.